rainbow-six posts

While there have been a ton of Tom Clancy-branded games from Ubisoft over the past few years (with more to come) the author himself hasn't released a new novel for the past six years. That changes today with the release of his latest techno-thriller, Dead or Alive.

The story centers on "The Campus" a fictional counter-terrorist agency that fights the bad guys without an official sanction from the US government. One of the main characters in Dead or Alive is "Ding" Chavez. Fans of the Rainbow Six game series will know that character as the leader of Team Rainbow in several installments of the tactical shooter franchise.

There have been thousands of PC games released in the past few decades but let's be honest: Most of them are not that original. Oh sure, some are professionally made and even entertaining to play but in the end very few bring anything new to the table.

There are some games, however, that attempt to break the envelope of normal gameplay and take things in new directions. Sometimes these games are big hits. Other times the ideas are used and refined by other titles even if the original game wasn't a sales success. These titles influenced many other titles since their original release.

Big Download has decided to give our picks for the top 20 most influential PC games of all time. These selections are not necessarily the best selling games ever made or even the best from a developer's point of view. However they all have elements that were original and/or popular enough to see their designs used in many other games. We are counting down from 20 to 11 today. Be here on Thursday when we reveal our selections for the top 10.

Click on the image above to continue reading about the top 20 most influential PC games (20-11)

If you like your games to have full co-op mode in the single player campaign then this year is a good time to be a fan of PC first person shooters. This week developer Treyarch and publisher Activision release Call of Duty: World at War, which finally adds co-op support for the first time in the series. Next week is even bigger as Valve finally releases the full version of Left 4 Dead, a game designed from the ground up to be a co-op shooter.

Today we look back at the history of co-op gameplay in first person shooter titles.The genre actually had quite a few games that supported such features when it first started but the last few years have seen a decline as FPS have emphasised more popular multiplayer features like deathmatch, CTF and more recently big team based gameplay. But with Call of Duty: World at War and Left 4 Dead out this month co-op gameplay may be coming back.

Click on the picture above to continue reading Playing Together: Co-Op in PC FPS Games.

Ubisoft has had a terrific last few years with a number of best selling games to its credit. Now the company has revealed exactly how many games its various franchises have sold over the years. According to a Gamesindustry.biz article the top seller is their Rayman series which have sold a whopping 22 million copies. The next three spots are all games based on the Tom Clancy brand (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell, and Ghost Recon) which together have sold a total of 55 million copies. No wonder Ubisoft wanted to buy the full rights to the Tom Clancy name.

The rest of the list shows some interesting figures such as Assassin's Creed selling six million total copies despite only being released for less than a year and the Brothers in Arms franchise selling 5 million copies over the years. Oddly enough, Ubisoft added the Driver franchise to the list with 14 million copies. However the vast majority of those games were sold by its previous owner Infogrames/Atari (Ubisoft bought the franchise and its developer, Reflections Interactive, in 2006).

Team Rainbow is all patched up and ready to fight for your right to gamble, again. Yesterday Ubisoft released a beefy 90Mb patch for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 which addresses numerous bugs, while adding new features to the popular tactical-shooter.

Most notably addressed in the 1.02 patch is putting a stop to the notorious Crashdump generation problem found in the original patch that horded up as much as 1GB of hard drive space during game crashes.

Added to Vegas 2 with 1.02 are speech recognition features as well as KillCam and SwapTeam options for the SADS (Stand Along Dedicated Server). Other bug fixes included in the patch promise to end game crashes while using customizable weapons and minimizing XP losses during server crashes.

The full list of additions and fixes can be found after the jump.

Download the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 1.02 Patch from Big Download!

Apparently it doesn't always pay to play in Vegas. At least not if you're playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC. When the game crashes (likely due to far too much Vegas styled fun and frivolity) the resulting memory dump can horde up as much as 1,000 megs (1 gig) of hard drive space. That's a whole lot of dumpage. That's Mafia-style dumpage.

The official R6V2 forums are alive with the sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the problem. As of this blogging, the forum admins are aware of the problem and have passed along the info to the developers, but a fix has not been forthcoming yet. They of course ask for your kind and benevolent forgiveness. And really... why not? You don't want to go and piss off a bunch of highly trained para-military sorts now do you? Ya, didn't think so.